As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as, but not limited to, financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information handling systems can experience recoverable or correctable errors during normal system operation, including, for example, when memory devices fail. To increase system reliability, information handling systems are often designed to capture and log recoverable or correctable errors as they occur, allowing for defective memory device(s) to be repaired or replaced.
Information handling systems often route errors to be logged by generating System Management Interrupt (SMI) signals. An SMI may be sent by a controller (e.g., Southbridge) to a processor, which then pauses, or freezes, ongoing system processes. These pauses in processing caused by the SMI enable the Basic-Input-Output System (BIOS) residing on the system to log the recoverable errors as they occur, using the SMI handler. Once the BIOS logs the errors, the SMIs end, and the system may resume performing any interrupted processes. The Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), which manages the interface between system management software and platform hardware, processes the error logging commands received from the BIOS and does the actual writing to its non-volatile memory.
However, when an information handling system includes a multi-processor, multi-core configuration, each core may have to enter an SMI when an error is detected. In this case, each core has to save the current state of the core, enter SMI, sync up after the interrupt, restore the state of the core, and exit SMI, thus suspending some or all processing on the information handling system, causing increased latencies.